Re: neo-mensural time signatures

From:

Orm Finnendahl

Subject:

Re: neo-mensural time signatures

Date:

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 17:41:23 +0200

User-agent:

Mutt/1.5.9i

Am 27. Juli 2006, 16:57 Uhr (+0200) schrieb Mats Bengtsson:
> See the first example in the section on Polymetric notation for
> information on how to modify the time signature with whatever
> text markup.
Thanks a lot. Do you know, what the Text markup would be to get the
neomensural signs printed centered on the staves? I couldn't find that
in the docs.
> I'm not an expert in neomensural notation, but as far as I can
> understand, the time signature concepts used in that music are so
> different from modern time signatures, so it's a bit arbitrary how
> to do the translation.
As far as I recall, the translation from the semibrevis sign in old
scores to our modern note values is more or less arbitrary (being a
factor of 1, 2 or 4). But the meaning of the neomensural "prolatione
perfecta" time signature glyph invariantly means (by definition) to
contain 3 semibrevis.
As the lilypond developers decided to identify the semibrevis sign
with a whole note (which is the way most modern scientific editions do
it as the visual appearance has a closer resemblance to the original
score), the prolatione perfecta invariantly means 3/1.
Yours,
Orm